Mists of Avalon - Marion Zimmer Bradley [60]
“Soldiers, lady,” said the old woman, sighing, “and Saxons gathering on the northern roads, too, and a battle . . . and Uther with his dragon banner, Saxons to the north of him, and, they say, the Duke of Cornwall against him to the south. Battle everywhere, even to the Holy Isle—”
Igraine demanded, “You have come from the Holy Isle?”
“Yes, lady, I was benighted by the lakes there, and lost in the mist. . . . The priests gave me dry bread and bade me come to mass and be shriven, but what sins has an old woman like me? My sins are all done and over, all forgotten and forgiven and not even regretted anymore,” she said with her thin laughter; it seemed to Igraine that she had not much wit, and what little she had, had been scattered by hardship and solitude and long wandering. “And indeed there is little opportunity for the old and poor to sin, except to doubt God’s goodness, and if God cannot understand why we doubt that, then he is not as wise as his priests think, heh heh heh . . . but I had no taste to listen to mass and it was colder inside their church than without, so I wandered in the mist and the fog, and then I saw a boat, and somehow I came to the Holy Isle, and there the women of the Lady gave me food and fire, like you . . . heh heh heh. . . .”
“You saw the Lady?” Igraine demanded, leaning forward and looking into the woman’s face. “Oh, give me news of her, she is my sister. . . .”
“Aye, she said as much to me, that her sister was wife to the Duke of Cornwall, if the Duke of Cornwall still lived, which she did not know about, heh heh heh. . . . Oh, aye, she gave me a message for you, that is why I came here through moors and rocks where my poor feet were mangled by all the stones, heh heh heh . . . now what did she say to me, poor me, I can’t remember, I think I lost the message in the mists around the Holy Isle, the priests, you know, they told me there was no Holy Isle, not never no more, they said, God had sunk it in the sea and if I thought I had been entertained there it was only witchcraft and the delusions of the devil. . . .” She paused, bent and cackling; Igraine waited.
Finally she asked, “Tell me of the Lady of Avalon. Did you see her?”
“Oh, aye, I saw her, not like you she is, but like a fairy woman, little and dark. . . .” The woman’s eyes brightened and then cleared. “Now I mind the message. She said, tell my sister Igraine that she should remember her dreams and not lose hope, and I laughed at that, heh heh heh, what good are dreams, except perhaps to you ladies in your great houses, not much good to those of us who wander the roads in the fog. . . . Ah, yes, this too: she was delivered of a fine son at harvesttime, and she bade me say that she was well beyond all hopes and expectations, and that she had named the boy Galahad.”
Igraine let out a long sigh of relief. So Viviane had indeed, against all hope, survived childbed.
The peddler woman went on, “She also said, heh heh heh, that he was a king’s son and that it was fitting that one king’s son should serve another. . . . Does this mean anything to you, my lady? It sounds like more dreams and moon shadows, heh heh heh. . . .” And she collapsed into giggling, hunched in her rags, spreading her thin hands to the warmth of the fire.
But Igraine knew the meaning of the message. One king’s son should serve another. So Viviane had indeed borne a son to King Ban of Less Britain, after the rite of the Great Marriage. And if, in the prophecy she and the Merlin had made, Igraine should bear a son to Uther, High King of Britain, one should serve the other. For a moment she felt herself trembling on the edge of the same hysterical laughter as the demented old woman’s. The bride is not yet brought to bed and here we make arrangement for the fostering of the sons!
In her heightened state, Igraine saw these children, the born and the unborn,